Sep 29, 2016

The No1 G5 Smart Watch is an eye catching gadget, with a stylish design and a low price. That's enough to trigger an impulsive order, but is it a keeper?I saw that watch on Chinavasion for 29.90$ (26.81€), and started to list the excuses to buy it:
- The price is not excessive
- It actually looks like a real watch, not too thick and nice looking, with an adult-size wristband.
- It's been a year since I tested a smart watch (actually, hardly 6 months)

The watch itself is a nice object, stylish and not bulky at all. The band is, for once, long enough to fit an adult wrist.
Another good point is the embedded micro USB slot, no special cradle needed. There are 3 buttons on the right side for quick access to the chronograph, step counter and main screen. The touch screen interface responds well and the display is pleasant and bright.
A handful of watch faces are installed and more can be added through the companion app. All looks well so far...

The companion app
Unlike some others , the dedicated app, Fundo Wear requires a free registration before interacting with the watch. Pairing is quite simple and the first connection went fine.

The app can send some additional watch faces, and also a Yahoo Weather screen to the watch. Only one can be stored in the watch at any time and the weather forecast turned out to be useless as it took way too long to get the data when it didn't simply time out.

Once the app synchronized the settings with the watch I started to receive notifications from SMS, Gmail and Hangouts....great! ...then the phone rang...
Actually, the ringtone came from the watch, so I pressed the green button on screen to accept the call and I, but also everybody around, could hear the other party talking loud and clear .

The problems was that I found no way to redirect the call back to the phone, and there's no option in the app ignore the phone calls either (Except from turning BT off).
Another app called Fundo Companion, has an option to separately control "SMS Service" and "Call service" but I could not make it work fully with this watch.

Bluetooth weirdness
It's also worth noting that, when the BT connection is stopped from the watch, it does not re-connect once turned back on, or at least not completely: it was possible to remotely take pictures or start the music, but not to sync data. I found myself having to re-pair the whole thing to get it fully interacting again.
On the compatibility side, nothing reads from this watch except the native app. I tried some gym equipment and popular android fitness apps, no luck!

Sleep and Heart Rate monitors are complete jokes
Although I had quite low expectations, this came as a surprise since another band in that price range (Makibes JW018) gave decent results, but the G5 is useless in that area.
Heart rate was consistently 10 to 15 pulses below the reality. It can do periodic readings but won't provide any readable report or graph with the results.
Sleep Monitoring is just monitoring the movements between fixed hours (I think 10pm and 7am), then spits out a report based on movements recorded in that timeframe.

Battery life: A full charge would last just about 12 hours, that it, with occasional BT connections, and a bit of fiddling with the touch screen from time to time but no phone calls at all! there's no mystery, the thinner the watch, the smaller the battery!Waterproof? You could wash your hands from time to time. Be careful tough!

Conclusions:The No1 G5 is one of the best looking watch in its price category (29.90$/26.81€) but that's all it is: a nice looking watch! It fails at being anything else, sport watch, health watch, or even a smart watch!

Good:
Nice looking
9.9mm thick
Bright display
Good sound quality
MiniUSB for charging, no need for a cradle
Wrist band suitable for adults

Not so good:
Battery hardly makes it through the day
App does not allow to disable phone calls interception.
Heart rate and Sleep monitor completely wrong
Splash proof only
Limited choice of faces and apps
App needs (free) registration to work

3 comments:

Another interesting example of how some amazing technology can be squeezed into a tiny space - but with an end result that falls short of being actually usable for the purpose intended.The short battery life alone, for a watch, is a real constraint.